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Archive for ‘Legal Information: Information Management’

The Role of Conflicts Information Specialist

Researching conflicts for law firms has been a function that has been around for many years now and lives in different departments depending on the law firm. But I only recently heard of Conflicts Information Specialist as being a full-time position. I am therefore thankful that Amanda Brooks has kindly shared her experiences as a Conflicts Information Specialist in a Canadian law firm over on the INALJ (“I need a library job”) website in the blog post A Day in the Life of a Conflicts Information Specialist.

Brooks discusses the role of the Conflicts Information Specialist:

The purpose of

. . . [more]
Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Practice of Law: Practice Management

The Internet of Things – and Tomorrow’s Law Firm

Press Release from London this morning

London, United Kingdom: 1 April 2014 – Janders Dean is pleased to announce the launch of the ShockLaw© wearable time management technology solution for law firms and lawyers – featuring the Bill-IT© bracelet with LawyerShock© vibration technology, the ShockLaw© Server, and associated mobile device monitoring apps.

In an age when the ‘Internet of everything’ is dominating technology development, Janders Dean is leading the market with the introduction of the ShockLaw© wearable platform – and showing true thought leadership with the product’s integration both across the lawyer’s workplace surroundings, and also across software applications being . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Miscellaneous, Practice of Law, Practice of Law: Future of Practice, Technology: Office Technology

Upcoming Workshop: Semantic Web and Legal Information

I am excited about the pre-conference workshop coming up in Winnipeg in May as part of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference. This will have interest wider than Association members, so please pass the word.

We are fortunate to be having Tim Knight and Sarah Sutherland present this workshop that will provide us with some initial groundwork in areas such as linked data, the semantic web and open data.

Description is below and there is more information on the CALL/ACBD website, along with registration information: http://www.callacbd.ca/en/content/pre-conference-workshop

I have already signed up and hope to see you there!

Pre-Conference Workshop 

. . . [more]
Posted in: Education & Training, Legal Information: Information Management

Proposed AODA Customer Service Changes

When the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council/Standards Development Committee was formed in 2013, one of its first orders of business was to review the Customer Service Standard as required under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA). The AODA requires that each accessibility standard be reviewed five years after it becomes law to determine whether the standard is working as intended and to allow for adjustments to be made as required. The council has proposed several changes to the Customer Service Standard and is asking interested stakeholders for feedback.
Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Information Management, Miscellaneous, Practice of Law, Substantive Law, Substantive Law: Legislation

Social Intranets Enable Knowledge Management

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to see Gordon Ross speak on a panel talking about the social intranet and KM for legal knowledge management practitioners in the public sector. Ross is a partner with the Vancouver-based consulting firm Open Road and the Vice President responsible for strategy and professional services for their social intranet platform ThoughtFarmer. He has written a blog post outlining his thoughts from that talk: How Social Intranets can Support Legal Knowledge Management.

While the post is quite a theoretical discussion, pointing to thinking by Max Boisot in his 1998 book Knowledge Assets around . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Technology: Office Technology

Applying the <indecs> Model to Interoperability of Legal Data?

I’m in the middle of teaching an introductory course on metadata and while preparing for an upcoming lecture I was reviewing the <indecs> model for e-commerce. It occurred to me that this model might have something to contribute to the interoperability of legal data.

<indecs> is a rather peculiar looking acronym that stands for Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce Systems. It’s a “metadata framework” or reference model similar in intention to the library community’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographical Records (FRBR). FRBR is a conceptual model that provides the cataloguing community with a common frame of . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management

Is There a Unified Approach to Legal Citation?

Robin Cover, Director of Information Services at OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), has released version 2 of his annotated bibliography on standards for legal citation.

This extensive collection provides a list of references “intended to provide general background to the larger ‘legal citation’ problem.” A Standardized Data/Markup Model to Support Neutral Citation of Court Cases, Legislation, and Regulations includes references from 1995 up to and including mid-January 2014.

In his introductory remarks Cover notes that “As of September 12, 2012, community discussion was underway about the value of a standardization effort to define a . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management

C’monnnnnn – Justice Laws Fail

I’m on for a little rant today but this is significant topic, courtesy of one of my LRW students conducting some research on the Nadon appointment to the SCC (on the plus side this does drive home the point I continually try to make that you cannot exclusively rely on one source or the web all the time). Interestingly, I thought we were getting rid of all the print government publications because the Interwebs are so much more efficient and effective? Well try and find SC 2013, c 40 which received Royal Assent on December 12, 2013, over a month . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Substantive Law: Legislation

The Dependence of Electronic Discovery and Admissibility Upon Electronic Records Management

1. The Conceptual Foundation for the Use of Electronic Records

The concepts and arguments developed below have been facilitated by what I have learned from experts in electronic records management. The following three analogies should be the foundation concepts for all that is written and said about the discovery and admissibility of electronic records:

1. An electronic record (an e-record) is merely an electronic impression upon an electronic storage device, which is but a part of an electronic records management system (an ERMS). An e-record in its ERMS, is like a drop of water in a pool of water. Like . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Miscellaneous, Practice of Law

Government Open Data

Last Thursday, the Edmonton Law Libraries Association welcomed Mark Diner, Chief Advisor, Open Government and Transparency, Service Alberta to give a presentation on Alberta’s Open Data initiative. Mark is best introduced with a blog post he wrote this summer about the, then new, Open Data Portal.

The Alberta Open Data initiative is supported by an Open Government Licence. Individuals are free to:

3.Copy, modify, publish, translate, adapt, distribute or otherwise use the Information in any medium, mode or format for any lawful purpose.

The idea of having access to data that would otherwise be costly (or impossible) to . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management

CanLII Innovates, Experiments

Lately CanLII has been shaking things up. The new search interface, in beta for four more days, is due to replace the current one on September 17. Then there’s the hackathon coming up this weekend in Ottawa, where you’re invited to learn how to become developers of apps that make use of CanLII’s API. And we learn from the recent blog post on CanLII that there’s a new forum for CanLII users, where they can share tips and give CanLII feedback. (At the moment it’s gathering spam, so that has to be cleaned out and blocked, if it’s . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management

A Research Powerhouse, a Big Data Warehouse

For a week now, users of the social media tool and Twitter data reseller Topsy have been able to search Twitter content from its 2006 beginnings; i.e., “every tweet ever”. (Direct messages not included in Topsy or other data.)

It has been widely noted that this extent of indexed data offers a more practically useful and more comprehensive reach than Twitter itself—and any other reseller—offers. Until last week, Topsy’s reach was to 2010, the middle of the brief period once covered by Google’s real-time search. That Google feature offered some historical research capability beyond the week or so . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Technology: Internet